Posted by rockyallen on Aug 21, 2017; 3:05pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/how-to-bypass-use-of-bibliography-tp5764p5862.html

I struggled with this too, as I wanted:

See [5].

== References
[5] Pragmatic programmer.

and in the current implementation I couldn't suppress the bullet.

My (ugly) work around is to use inline anchors and hard code the numbers:

== Intro
_The Pragmatic Programmer_ [<<prag>>] should be required reading for all developers.

== References
[3] [[prag,3]]Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer:  From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley. 1999

Asciidoctor-bibtex looks promising, but  I couldn't get it to work with Asciidoctorj. If you manage it, please let me know how.

Re your second question, [[[3]]] probably fails because "3" is not a valid id name (allows lower case letters, digits, periods, hyphens, underscores, but must not start with a digit).